CoSort Adds Data Protection at the Field Level

Here's a happy coincidence: Just when Innovative Routines International's customers were beginning to ask that security features be added to CoSort—data manipulation software for Windows, Linux, and Unix flat files—IRI was already developing and implementing them. IRI VP David Friedland said the company saw the additions as a way to expand the market for the product beyond its role in data warehousing. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

The new version of CoSort, CoSort 9.0, can protect different fields in a file in different ways: with 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption, anonymization, de-identification, pseudonymization, filtering, or obfuscation. CoSort's SortCL language can perform these tasks in the same job script that it performs its traditional sorting, joining, aggregation, conversion, and reporting tasks.

CoSort is designed to quickly process huge comma-separated value (CSV), index, LDAP Data Interchange Format (LDIF), sequential, text, XML, and other portable files. The new ability to protect individual fields in those files (and do it quickly alongside other required data manipulation) should make CoSort appealing to industries such as financial and health care that need to protect customer data.